Response to Marjane Satrapi

Dear Ms. Marjane Satrapi,

I first encountered your book, Persepolis, when it appeared on the syllabus for an anthropology class on "Women and Islam" that I took in the fall of 2008. I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit that it was the first 'comic book' that I had ever read. As a result, I approached it as I would any other work of literature, and was unsure what to make of its lighthearted descriptions of repressive or violent situations. When you came to speak at Scripps College on April 9th, I was also somewhat stunned to hear you say that you think of yourself as a cartoonist, not an author, and that you don't like it when people refer to Persepolis as a "graphic novel".

However, asking the question of "what is literature?" is certainly valuable. For a written work to be called "literature", it has to earn that label, or justify why it deserves to be in that category. This begs for the question "who decides what literature is?". People often forget that a system is in place deciding what makes it and what doesn't. That system needs to be constantly questioned by introducing new voices. Watching and reading are generally passive acts, but they don't have to be.

I realized that your point of view on literature probably gets ignored by many because it doesn't support exclusivity in academia. Comics get dismissed as "unsophisticated"; yet, comics speak through the language of drawings and images, which is the first language of all people, and universal in its own way. Text lends itself to more speculation, but authors get put on artificially high pedestals that often cause admirers to forget the author's humanity.

You said that Persepolis is more about history than autobiography, but I think that personal storytelling is important for bringing people of different backgrounds together. The time and place of one's life are central to one's life experience. Yet, as an American woman, when I think about women in or from the Middle East, what I most want to know about is what they have in common with me, so the autobiographical elements of Persepolis are really valuable. Maybe you didn't want to call it "autobiography" because that implies some kind of cathartic or therapeutic "need" to write the story. You seem like a strong, opinionated woman, both qualities that I admire very much.

You made several interesting points about the American media's view of the Middle East that opened my eyes. For example, when you asked whether "values" such as love and family exist everywhere, and my first instinct was to answer "yes, they do"; and yet many people talk about the "culture clash" as if the values of East and West, or Muslims and Christians had nothing in common. This creates unfair demonization of Muslims, creating more conflict and getting us nowhere. If the only real division in the world exists between fanatics and non-fanatics, we would be much better off focusing on education and alleviating the economic need that often drives people toward resentment and intolerance.

I wish that I'd had the courage to ask you more questions about the role of gender in Persepolis, and what you meant when you said that comics are not a genre, but a medium. You did mention that one motivation for creating your book was the fact that there are very few female characters in comics to relate to. The roles, viewpoints, and feelings of women from Muslim countries is a popular topic for debate, but information and stories from a primary source seem to be rare. Of course, you aren't expected to represent such a large demographic, but one voice is better than none at all.

Although you stated that you would like readers to approach Persepolis as a comic and not as literature, I'm going to agree to disagree on that point. I feel that it's appropriate to approach it as a book, because the literary world needs to be exposed to more stories by women writing about themselves. Also, people from the Middle East offering a different perspective on their homelands than the mass media need to be heard, and Persepolis contributes to a positive culture in both ways.

Sincerely,
Claire Palermo